Personal Experiences: HID Lighting or Powerful CFL's?

Since joining RIU, I've made use of this site's vast amount of information to successfully begin my first serious indoor grow. With the help of user's own experiences and basic acquired knowledge, I've germinated, planted and transplanted, all in the effort to create an impressive closet garden.

My grow consists of a twelve 42w CFL bulb fixture covering most foliage of my seven vegetating plants, each of which is growing in a 5-gallon mixed soil medium. They are around three weeks old, and growing steadily. I hope to install a more powerful HPS soon.


For anyone with who has yielded noteworthy results in the past: What lighting techniques have worked best in past experiences? And how did you achieve these results?

That is quite a broad question, man.

I think your question is probably a bit broad. But just in my opinion, I think CFLs are used mainly for the convenience factor. It's easy to wire up a CFL light fixture and stick it anywhere with ease and not having to worry too much about heat or the cost of creating the lighting.

For me it's all about wattage, I think once you start to get to a lot of CFLs, I would just go to an equivalent wattage HPS. I would say in your case you have over 400 watts of CFLs, if I were to have that many I'd just go with a similiarly sized HPS.

Just my opinion of course.